first week of work!

Apologies for the long silence, but this was my first week at work, and I’ve spent most of it frantically learning about the wireless industry, about which I knew absolutely nothing. (I’m working at OpenWave, btw: http://www.openwave.com, which does wireless messaging, email, and browser applications.) So suddenly I’ve been dumped into it, and being a professional services project manager now, I don’t just have to understand the technology; I have to understand the technology, the market, our customers’ needs, and incidentally how to negotiate with customers, handle billing, estimate efforts for custom jobs, and write up contractual documents. And when we can book revenue and when to take revenue, and a whole bunch of business-side stuff about which I had (previously) been blissfully ignorant.

Oh, and my boss quit Wednesday.

So all in all, it’s been an interesting week. 🙂

What this means is:

(a) I am getting ALL the projects, current and prospective, dumped on me, since my boss is leaving;

(b) there are all sorts of interesting politics going on around what will happen to the group;

(c) instead of getting a month and a half to learn about my new company, products, and industry, I have to figure it all out next week. After that, I have a new manager who will also be new to all of this, so I have to suck as much as possible out of my old boss’s brain before he goes.

So…it’s been a wee bit busy.

I’m actually a bit sorry that the guy who hired me isn’t sticking around; I think he’s a good manager, smart guy, would love to work for him. It’s also not clear what’s going to happen if he leaves–though I’m not worried about getting laid off, for various reasons. (It’s way more likely that people will argue over who gets me, a prospect I find highly ironic after over two years of unemployment.)

There’s a considerable amount of politics around all this that I won’t go into, mostly because I don’t understand it (yet). But since my boss is going, I’m getting tossed into all the internal and customer politics that he would otherwise have been fielding for me. (And here–honest to goodness–I had sworn that I was going to spend the first year or so being apolitical, and “just doing my job”.) But since I enjoy untangling political stuff, it’s not a huge burden–it just means I have to pick it up waaaay faster than I had planned.

The good news is that I think I can actually handle all of that. Maybe.

We’ll see.

But there are two other bits of good news from this week:

(1) the bits of my sample chapter (for my book on AIDS Lifecycle) got reviewed by my writing class on Monday, and got excellent reviews! More than that, my writing teacher (who is multiply published herself) said, “I think it’ll be a good book, and I think it will sell. And I think this will be a good sample chapter.”

(2) I spent an hour talking to someone who’s filming a PBS documentary on AIDS Lifecycle, and offered him help in a bunch of things (not least of which is finding riders to interview). He was really grateful, and offered to do free footage for me if I needed something to promote the book! I have no idea what I’d do with it, but it was very sweet of him to offer. Between that and the other TV producer who said she might be able to do a half-hour author spot with me if the book got published, that’s very cool news. 🙂

More on fiber arts and fashion in a separate post…this one’s getting way long.